by Sara Maternini

Question: can anyone tell me anything about “Lotus Kitten Food”?
I just got a baby siamese mix kitten 2 days ago. We have started her off on Wellness Kitten formula but little Sidney is just not that thrilled with it. When I went into my natural pet store yesterday to look for some toys and organic cat nip they handed me a sample of this “Lotus” kitten formula. Sidney really likes it she is eating it like its going out of style. I just want to see if anyone has any info on this food. I don’t want to switch our little one over to this food if it is not as good or better than wellness. Also I am open to suggestion if anyone can sugest a better food. Thanks in advance everyone!

Answer:

Answer by E-Fox
I checked the ingredients and I don’t really like it, I see rice and grain on the ingredient list and that’s not something cats should eat. These are not a part of cat’s natural diet (it’s an obligate carnivore – it eats meat) and they are not designed to digest it. Grain/rice is carbohydrate which the cats can’t process and it turns into blood sugar and fat, causing diabetes and obesity. In the wild, where cats only hunt for meat, diabetes and obesity are unheard of. It’s us who cause these by feeding a species inappropriate food.

I looked at the guaranteed analysis and the ash content is through the roof! 7%!!! That’s way too much, should be about 2-3. Also calculating from the guaranteed analysis, the food has 24% carbs. Cats shouldn’t have any carbs, and would do fine with up to 5-10%, but best less than 5%. So I can’t recommend this food.

I wouldn‘t really recommend feeding any dry food. Cats are designed to get their water from food. That’s the way nature designed them, they have low thirst drive. When fed dry, they won’t drink enough to compensate for the lack of moisture. They will only consume about 50% of the water they should be having. This can lead to kidney disease, UTI, crystals, blockage, renal failure and more.

Free feeding also contributes to obesity. And the fact that dry food is over-processed means, that most of it’s little nutrition has been already destroyed, leaving almost no nutrients for your cat. It needs to eat more to meet it’s needs, and in the process consumes more calories from the fillers.

Btw wetting the dry food will not help. There’s bacteria on the kibble and the water would just allow it to grow.

The only way to give the cat it’s natural hydration is to feed it wet food only.

We usually read labels on our food, but rarely on the food for our cats. Learn to read the label and understand the ingredients. The healthiest food to feed apart from raw feeding is grain-free wet food with no by-product. Some good brands are Wellness CORE, EVO, Merrick, Nature’s Variety, Blue Buffalo Wilderness and more. These will give your cat the proper hydration and nutrition it’s designed to get and it will be strong and healthy. You don’t need to feed kitten food since in the nature it would eat the same thing as the mother. But you can try Wellness CORE which has a combined kitten/cat formula.

If you switch it’s diet, do it gradually, by mixing the current food with the new one over couple of weeks until there’s only the new. This will prevent diarrhea and upset stomach.

You will probably get a lot of different answers, so google feline nutrition or look at the links below, and do the research for yourself. I personally wasn’t able to find one reliable source (besides the pet food industry) that would say grain is beneficial for cats or that dry is beneficial for them.

More on cat nutrition below,

Good luck!